Friday, September 11, 2009

From the prairie state of Illinois, where there hasn't been a conservative run the state since Al Capone was stealing lunch money from his fellow students......

Want to retire with a fat pension? Get a government job in Illinois.

Nearly 4,000 retired government workers have pensions that pay them at least $100,000 a year. They include politicians, judges, doctors and school administrators, as well as top cops, firefighters and park officials.

More than half have collected more than $1 million each since they retired. A few have topped $2 million. And five have gotten more than $3 million each, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found.

And these numbers are soaring faster than taxpayers can afford.

Consider:

• 3,958 retirees have pensions paying $100,000 or more a year.

• 2,255 of those retirees have each collected more than $1 million in pension benefits. They include two doctors who have each gotten more than $3 million over the last 10 years.

• 14,280 retirees have pensions that pay them more than their final salaries. That's largely because all government pensions in Illinois automatically increase 3 percent every year.

• 11,521 retirees get checks from two or more government pension plans.

• 23 widows each get more than $100,000 a year, every year, in survivor benefits.

• 16 judges' widows have each gotten more than $1 million since their husbands died

They called it paradiseThe place to beThey watched the sinking sun Sinking in the sea

From the golden state of California, who hasn't had a conservative run the state since Charlton Heston was doing Moses impersonations.........

The price of a public education at the University of California may be going up again - not once, but twice.

UC President Mark Yudof is recommending a 15 percent increase in in-state undergraduate fees that would take effect next spring, and another 15 percent increase on top of that beginning in fall 2010.

The governing Board of Regents will hear details of the proposal - which also includes graduate-level fee increases of 15 percent - at its meeting Wednesday, but won't vote until November.

If approved, the undergraduate fee increases would be the eighth and ninth in seven years, and would send the price of a year at UC above the $10,000 mark for the first time next fall.

"It makes me really angry," said Gracelynne West, 20, a first-generation college student at UC San Diego who expects to graduate in June with years of debt to pay off.

Riddle me this Batman. How is it the liberals keep bitching about health care costs but never education costs?

Even better; do you know how the feds go after credit cards companies for targeting college kids loaded up on debt but never the predatory federal student loan programs, who load up kids with liberal arts degrees with debt that measure in the tens of thousands?

The former judge-executive of Perry County plans to plead guilty in a federal vote-buying case.

The attorney for Sherman Neace filed a motion Thursday seeking a hearing for Neace to be rearraigned, meaning to enter a guilty plea. The hearing has not been scheduled.

Neace, 68, and Chester Jones, 65, another longtime county official, are charged with using $7,500 from the state Democratic Party to buy votes for themselves last November.

In that election, Neace was running for magistrate and Jones for school board.

According to the indictment, the state Democratic Party sent the local Democratic Party Executive Committee $7,500 to use in promoting voting. Jones was chairman of the local party executive committee.

Jones allegedly went to the bank where the party had its account and got 75 blank counter checks and filled them out for $100 apiece, leaving the payee line blank, the indictment said.

Not if you work for Boeing where one of their plants just voted to decertify.....

Boeing Co. workers voted overwhelmingly Thursday to disband the union at the North Charleston factory, boosting prospects corporate officials will consider the Lowcountry for a second assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner.

Of the fewer than 300 International Association of Machinist organized workers at the local plant eligible to vote, 199 voted to decertify the union and 68 voted to keep it in place, Boeing spokeswoman Candy Eslinger said.

“We are pleased that hourly workers elected to deal directly with the company on employment matters,” Eslinger said. “We are also pleased that Boeing Charleston can move forward and meet commitments on the 787 program.”

One of the myths being perpetrated by liberals on this health care issue is that there is this huge population out there with no access to health care.

This a complete lie.

Maybe you are not aware, but the fact is, if you are a property owner, you are already paying to for people's health care via property taxes.

As you can see from the scan to the side, Gordon Gekko pays $43.38 every six months for indigent health care. That's $86.76 a year, one little business property in Loveland. That doesn't count the taxes we pay on our palatial three bedroom palace in Maineville.

Those tax dollars are used to cover indigent people who need medical care.

Now, let's say you show up to the emergency room with a gun shot wound and no insurance card. You get treated.

If you don't have insurance but you can afford to pay, you pay. Just like you would pay for the lottery tickets and six packs you could have used for insurance.

If you are indigent, you fill out some forms and this fund pays for you on a sliding scale. Case closed.

I'm sick of hearing about the numbers of people who have no coverage. The fact is people get health care in this country. As much as maybe some need? No. But not so many that we need to initiate an entire socialized program.

"We are the only advanced democracy on Earth - the only wealthy nation - that allows such hardships for millions of its people," Obama said. "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone."

That's quite a change from earlier this year when Obama was using different numbers. On July 22, the president used a much larger number in a press conference. He said had cited "47 million Americans" with no insurance, a mistake that had been made the previous two years by many in the media (emphasis added).

"This is not just about the 47 million Americans who don't have any health insurance at all," Obama said. "Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job, or change their job. It's about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage because it became too expensive."

From the city of Detroit, who hasn't had a conservative run the city since Lewis and Clark were drawing maps.....

At least 7 in 10 people who committed murder in this city last year have gotten away with it.

The most generous interpretation of 2008 homicide warrants and convictions supplied by local law enforcement officials shows that in more than 70 percent of homicide cases no suspect has been identified, arrested, charged or convicted of a killing.

"The reality is, we have a reputation in the state that if you want to commit a crime, come here," said Kym Worthy, the Wayne County prosecutor who said she does not challenge the analysis. "The chance of arrest is quite low, the chance of prosecution is quite low. What does that say about the commitment to the public's safety?"

Police said they arrested a suspected robber on Sunday after he returned to his victim's home to ask her out on a date. According to investigators, Stephfon Bennett was one of three men who robbed a couple on the city's north side late Sunday night, 10TV News reported. Less than two hours after the robbery, police said that Bennett, 20, returned to the home and asked Diana Martinez out on a date. "We are not exactly sure what he was thinking at the time," said Columbus police Sgt. Sean Laird. "She recognized him right away when he returned and was able to have her cousin call 911."

So given that people are having a hard time wondering "what he was thinking at the time", did that make him a automatic vote for The One or Four More Years of Bush?

While the Obamunists are throwing around money to all these political backers, Maybe they could throw a trillion around to rebuild the nations dams..........

Responsibility for ensuring the safety of the rest of the nation’s dams falls to state dam safety programs. Many state dam safety programs do not have sufficient resources, funding, or staff to conduct dam safety inspections, to take appropriate enforcement actions, or to ensure proper construction by reviewing plans and performing construction inspections. For example, Texas has only 7 engineers and an annual budget of $435,000 to regulate more than 7,400 dams. Alabama does not have a dam safety program despite the fact that there are more than 2,000 dams in the state. And in some states many dams are specifically exempted from inspection by state law. In Missouri there are 740 high hazard potential dams that are exempted because they are less than 35 feet in height.

In 2009, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) estimated that the total cost to repair the nation’s dams totaled $50 billion and the needed investment to repair high hazard potential dams totaled $16 billion. These estimates have increased significantly since ASDSO’s 2003 report, when the needed investment for all dams was $36 billion and the needed investment for high hazard potential dams was $10.1 billion.

The 2009 report noted an additional investment of $12 billion over 10 years will be needed to eliminate the existing backlog of 4,095 deficient dams. That means the number of high hazard potential dams repaired must be increased by 270 dams per year above the number now being repaired, at an additional annual cost of $850 million a year. To address the additional 2,276 deficient—but not high hazard—dams, an additional $335 million per year is required, totaling $3.4 billion over the next 10 years

Camille Paglia comes off the liberal plantation for these observations.....

This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster — as witness the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to "green jobs" czar Van Jones last week — but there's a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Hiring expectations for the fourth quarter are improving around the world except in one key region: the U.S. That's the finding of two quarterly employment outlook surveys released Tuesday by Manpower Inc. ( MAN).

Employers in 17 of the 35 countries and territories expect to add to their workforce next quarter, according to the Manpower Global Outlook Survey. And 20 of 34 regions reported an improvement in the job outlook, "indicating an easing in the pattern of layoffs prevalent in the past several quarters," the survey said.

A key exception to the improving trend was in the U.S. The Manpower U.S. Employment Outlook Survey showed among U.S. employers, only 12% expect to add to their workforce in the October-December period, while 14% expect a decline and 69% see no change. Manpower says the results suggest employers expect a slight decrease in the rate of hiring when compared to third-quarter results. The outlook is "considerably weaker" than the year-ago results, the survey said.

Now why might that be.

1) The increase in the minimum wage2) The uncertainty regarding health care mandates3) The uncertainty surrounding card check legislation4) The over regulation on management compensation5) Increases in income taxes and payroll taxes.

Yeah I can see why US employers might be a little hesitant to hire on employees in this environment. Do the Obamunists?

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation's medical care before the August recess-- for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years-- more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?

If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don't we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to "hurry up and wait" on something that is literally a matter of life and death?

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.

Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.

Unfortunately, this way of doing things is all too typical of the way this administration has acted on a wide range of issues.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

"This administration has the potential to be FDR or Jimmy Carter, and I think the Republicans are going to do everything they can to make him Jimmy Carter, to create a failed presidency."

Clue phone to Joe, there is really nothing the republicans can do to create a failed presidency for The One.

Seriously, I love how the media will try to blame the republicans for any failed Obama agenda item.

Remember? He won! And so did Lollapelosi, The Weasel and huge majorities in both chambers.

If The Messiah showed any leadership skills within his own party, there is absolutely nothing he couldn't accomplish in his attempt to turn the US into France; the majorities are just too overwhelming.

What I don't get is this. If socialist policies are so great, advance them with your democratic leadership and majorities, turn the country around, take credit for it and then rule for the next 70-80 years. It's almost like these guys want and need republicans for cover so their FUBAR assault on America can't be blamed on them.

Any failure of Obama to get anything done is the democrat's failure; plain and simple. It's also why it's important to pressure all republicans not to advance this socialist agenda. Force the dems to own their messes (see California).

Now the media gets to portray the Van Jones resignation as a product of a vast right wing lynch mob by reporting that Jones was guilty of calling republicans a bad word and signing a "truther" statement. Totally ignoring the fact that he was a self described communist and a litany of other offenses that made him totally unfit for a public office.

In addition, it should be noted that the NY Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS et al reported not one thing about Jones until this weekend.

Gateway Pundit, a conservative blog, did all the leg work on a story that was a slam dunk scoop for the traditional media outlets. Well, except for the fact that they would have let go of the Obama water buckets for a couple of hours.

It's a good thing those mainstream media types have fact checkers and all, otherwise they'd totally screw up a quote from one Mark Steyn........

As Times reporters James C. McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”

So of course, since the NY Times didn't fact check it, every other media outlet simply parroted this misstatement (read all the allegedly credible news sources here)

So what did Steyn actually say about the Obama cult of personality?

Oh, dear! “A Canadian author”: Talk about damning with faint credentialization. I don’t know what’s crueler, the “Canadian” or the indefinite article. As to the rest of it, well, that’s one way of putting it. Here’s what I said on Wednesday re dear old Saddam and Kim: “Obviously we’re not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale.”

Big difference eh?

But it really explains why a lie from the Times spreads like a R2D2 virus across the traditional news organism.